The fires lit by Standing Rock have spread to Minnesota. This August, a group of indigenous youth fighting the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline will undertake a 250-mile canoe journey across northern Minnesota to stand for the cleanest lakes, the manoomin (wild rice) beds and the 1855 treaty territories of the Ojibwe people.

We will start where the new Line 3 would cross the headwaters of the great Mississippi River, and travel a traditional canoe route to end at Big Sandy Lake, where hundreds of Ojibwe were killed by the US government in 1850.

A CONTROVERSIAL PROPOSAL for a tar sands oil pipeline has led indigenous leaders in Minnesota to threaten an uprising similar to the one near Standing Rock last fall. That conflict began with what tribes described as the federal government’s failure to properly consult with nearby tribal communities prior to permitting the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

In July, Danielle Oxendine Molliver, the tribal liaison brought on by Minnesota’s Department of Commerce to consult with indigenous leaders about Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 pipeline, resigned in protest of what she called a flawed environmental review process that lacked transparency, professionalism, and fairness.

In a resignation letter submitted on July 24, Oxendine Molliver stated, “There are a multitude of reasons why I have come to this decision. The single most important one is the failure of the state of Minnesota to fulfill its obligations of good faith and fair dealing with the tribes in connection with the Line 3 project.”....

AFTER BEING SIDELINED, Oxendine Molliver spent meeting after meeting ushering guests to the refreshments, but at a final meeting held just for tribal members, on June 27, she was struck by images presented by Sheila Lamb, who is Ojibwe and Cherokee and has long been involved in environmental activism. They showed long lines of pipe being transported by truck and rail, and stacked inside a fence.

“There are staging areas already,” Lamb said, according to a transcript of the proceedings. “The newest one is between Kettle River and Rice. It is a huge fenced area with barbed wire on top, the whole nine yards, where they’re taking the pipes to. We’re talking trucks running every 10 to 15 minutes carrying in pipes. As of yesterday, there were 35 carloads of pipes just that we could count sitting right in Carlton.”

“Is this already a done deal?” Lamb asked the Commerce Department officials. Her question touched issues that extended beyond the scope of the environmental impact statement. Enbridge has already started construction in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as on the 12-mile segment in Wisconsin. Minnesota is the last state that hasn’t granted regulatory approval, giving it huge sway in determining the future of the pipeline.

Jamie MacAlister, a project manager for the Commerce Department, replied to Lamb, “[Decision-makers] don’t know that there’s pipes stacked up out here. In fact, I didn’t know there was pipes stacked up out here until I came to this meeting.” She added, “Enbridge does not have any permits. They’re not allowed to do any construction until they receive those permits.”

At the meeting that led Enbridge to complain about Oxendine Molliver, Winona LaDuke, a longtime environmental activist who played a key role in the movement to kill Sandpiper, described her takeaways from the draft environmental impact statement. “When you go all the way through it, it says, we heard you. We heard that your people are hurting. We heard that your people can barely hang on. We heard that this is the only land you have. We heard that this is the only wild rice you have. We heard that your communities are already under a lot of duress. We heard that your communities are already sick from contaminants,” she said. “But mitigation is gonna be good.

“We don’t want to throw down a camp like Standing Rock, but this is not Morton County — you’re not getting another pipeline through here,” she added. “And there are hundreds of Ojibwe people and thousands of other people that are going to stop that line if you approve a permit. So we’d just like to stop it before we get to that.”

Opponents of Enbridge Line 3 publicly launched two camps on Wednesday, one on the White Earth reservation and another near the Fond du Lac reservation.

And in Wisconsin, six people were arrested after one person locked himself to a piece of heavy machinery to stop the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. The proposed line would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to a terminal in Superior, Wisconsin. It faces sustained resistance from indigenous nations and environmental activists in both the U.S. and Canada.

Resistance against Enbridge’s Line 3 Pipeline expansion is ramping up. Near the Fon du Lac Reservation, at the frontline camp, Makwa, water protectors, land defenders, warriors, and others have participated in a wave of civil disobedience that has resulted in 16 arrests in multiple actions that have delayed construction work on the pipeline in the last month. On the morning of September 18, Unicorn Riot covered another direct action to stop construction on the Wisconsin side of the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.

Hundreds of residents gathered in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in Saint Paul on Thursday for a rally to “Hold the Line” against a pipeline project called Line 3. Backed by the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge Energy, the inter-state project was the subject of the city’s only public meeting held later that day, and residents were firmly determined to make their voices heard.

With an hour to go until the public hearing, they marched over a mile to the InterContinental Saint Paul Riverfront hotel. Once inside, they argued against the project’s approval to the judge who will decide Line 3’s fate next year.

“It’s just nice to be in a sea of people who feel the same way that you do,” said Mysti Babineau of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe in northwestern Minnesota. “It gives me hope because a lot of these people I’m seeing nowadays are so young.”.....

At 11 o'clock this morning, four people chained themselves to a structure blocking an entrance of the Bank of America on 5th and Olive Street. Two of them locked themselves to the apex of a tripod, suspended at least a dozen feet in the air. The protesters were still there as of 2 p.m, blocking people from entering the bank.

Around the corner of the building was Feanette Black Bear, 65, holding the end of a sign blocking the building's other entrance and a bundle of sage. "We shut down business today!" she said.

For Black Bear, who is Lakota, today's action grows out of what she calls "an awakening for future generations."

"I'm here in support of our future generations, the unborn, and for the people here today, for Mni Wiconi, for treaty rights," Black Bear said, using the Lakota rallying cry heard at Standing Rock last year, and since then, the world over. In Lakota, Mni Wiconi translates to "water is life."

The Bank of America protest is just one of 100 demonstrations taking place across Seattle as part of Divest the Globe, a three-day activism campaign organized by Mazaska Talks, an indigenous-led coalition including Lakota educator Matt Remle and Muckleshoot activist Rachel Heaton, with support from 350 Seattle's Alec Connon. Remle reported on Twitter that at least one other bank was shut down in Seattle.

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Organizer Rachel Heaton told The Stranger that Mazaska Talks—Mazaska being the Lakota term for "shiny metal," as in money—urges people to divest themselves from banks that finance private prisons and pipelines. While activists targeted Bank of America because of its involvement in financing Alberta tar sands extraction, Heaton said that the days of action are also meant to draw attention to the 92 banks meeting in Brazil this month that have signed on to the "Equator Principles," a framework that's supposed to help guide financial institutions' social and environmental responsibilities when financing new projects.

On November 14, 2017, five water protectors took action in solidarity with front line Indigenous resistance efforts at Camp Makwa to stop the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota. The activists locked down to each other and used their bodies to disrupt business as usual at Wells Fargo, one of the major financial players behind this genocidal, extractive fossil fuel project.

Wells Fargo has 743 million invested into Enbridge who is responsible for Tar Sands and the Line 3 pipeline threatening and ravaging through Indigenous lands, water, wild rice, and sovereignty in Minnesota.

This action is one of hundreds taking place across the globe to call for divestment from financial institutions invested in the destructive fossil fuel industry.

The Student Pipeline Action Committee (SPAC) is pleased to announce its second “Water is Life” Fundraising Campaign! SPAC was formed in January 2017 by a group of first year law students from Robson Hall, and has since been ratified as an official student group recognized by the University of Manitoba, with an expanded mandate:

“SPAC is committed to supporting action and resistance against pipelines in North America, and furthering the dialogue concerning the detrimental environmental and human impacts of resource extraction.”

In support of this mandate, we hosted a speaker panel, “Beyond Borders: Pipeline Resistance From Standing Rock to Manitowapow” – bringing together legal, grassroots, and frontline perspectives. Following the success of this event, we are pleased to launch our next “Water is Life” Fundraising Campaign.

Inspired by the action of Water Protectors, the messaging is simple: “Water is Life”. Water and environmental protection has been at the heart of the many conversations across North America on the topic of pipelines and resource extraction. The design was created by Anishinaabe artist and graphic designer Danielle H. Morrison using the woodlands style of Norval Morrisseau. The visual depicts the interconnectedness of land, animals, and water, and is circular in essence to represent the cycle of life.....